Daniel Carter's Here Both Sweeter is a book in which you "have a seedling in each pocket," a "body bodies," and words are something you "carve out" so as to make a home. The poems are stories, are seeds, are secret messages cast and sent across the natural world to a reader, where they blossom in the imagination. The plot is "scatter-wild," the lyrics "all willful and fallow." Carter's language serves as a garden, rich and strange, full of acorns and ink and ash, and in it the green world (of nature, of the heart and body, of words and ideas) is overturned, recycled, and remade.

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis's Poppy Seeds creates an "immaculate atlas." Here language is "broken... against the margin of the sea," and a word is a thing that can be "wash ed] away." Here the body is both a lesson and a place with an edge you can drive to. The book "longs s] for as long as Ohio rivers." Tangled between worlds and languages both old and new, our deepest emotions search for their roots, hoping to find a place to call home.